“I must be getting old,” I said to Man. “Lori seemed like one of us.”
“She is. She didn’t know we were listening.”
Bill and Sara were at the top of the stairs in nightgowns. “Come on down. We’re not going to say anything you can’t hear.”
“But I am,” Man said. “Go back to bed.” They obeyed. Disappointing, but not surprising. They’d listen anyhow. “This is Antres 906,” Man said, “the cultural attache to Middle Finger.”
I nodded at it. “Okay.”
“Are you curious as to why he is here?”
“Not really. Just go ahead and have your say.”
“He is here because a Tauran representative must be present in any negotiations involving possible travel to Tauran planets.”
“What does that have to do with culture?” Marygay said
“Pardon me?”
“It’s the cultural attache,” she said. “What does that have to do with us borrowing the time shuttle?”
” `Culture’ includes tourism. And stealing is not borrowing.”
“They’re not on our route,” I said. “We’re going straight up, out of the galactic plane, and straight back. An isosceles triangle, actually.”
“You should have gone through proper channels for this.”
“Sure. Starting with you, the sheriff.” He covered the back of his hand, with its identifying scar.
“You could start with anyone. We are a group mind.”
“But you didn’t send just anyone. You sent the one Man in this town who has weapons and exercises with weights.”
“You are both soldiers.” He opened his vest to display a large pistol. “You might resist.”
“Resist what?” Marygay said.
“Coming with me. You’re under arrest.”
Paxton doesn’t have a large enough criminal element to warrant an actual jail, but I suppose anything that locks on the outside will do. I was in a white room with no windows, furnished with a mattress on the floor and a toilet. There was a fold-down sink next to the toilet, and across from it, a fold-down desk. But no chair. The desk had a keyboard, but it didn’t work.
It had a barroom smell, spilled alcohol. That must be what they used as a disinfectant, for some reason.
I knew from a visit last year that the place had only two detention rooms, so Marygay and I constituted a crime wave. (Serious criminals, actually, didn’t even spend the night here; they went straight to the real jail in Wimberly.)
I spent a while contemplating the error of my ways, and then managed to get a few hours’ sleep in spite of not being able to turn off the lights.
When the sheriff opened the door I could see sunshine behind him; it was ten or eleven. He handed me a white cardboard box that had soap, a toothbrush, and such. “The shower is across the hall. Please join me for tea when you are ready.” He left with no further explanation.
There were two showers; Marygay was already in one of them. I raised my voice. “He tell you anything?”
“Just unlocked the door and said to come for tea. Why didn’t we ever think of doing this with the children?”
“Too late to start now.” I showered and shaved and we went to the sheriff’s office together.
His pistol was hanging on a peg behind him. The papers on his desk had been hastily stacked in a corner, and he’d set out a pot of tea with some crackers and jam and honey.
We sat and he poured us tea. He looked tired. “I’ve been with the Tree all night.” Since it had become daytime in Centrus, he might have been with hundreds or a thousand Men. “I have a tentative consensus.”
“That took all night?” I said. “For a group mind, you don’t synape very fast.” I kidded my Man colleagues at the university about that. (Physics, in fact, was a good demonstration of Man’s limitations: an individual Man could tap into my colleagues’ brains, but he or she wouldn’t understand anything advanced without having previously studied physics.)
“In fact, much of that time was waiting for individuals to be summoned. Besides your…problem, there was another important decision to be made, not unrelated. `The more leaves, the more Tree.’ ”
The jam was greenberry, a spicy sour flavor I’d liked immediately–one of the only things that had impressed me, the first day on Middle Finger. I’d arrived in deep winter.